Kolam

The speaker discovers beauty where no one looks for it: in the throat of a tiger lily, a dog that sees on four legs, the moles on a lover’s skin. Gardening and turning the soil take on the weight of ritual, close to communion. Architecture runs through the book, from an opening section of angular modernist buildings to the chance design of wire hangers, tent poles, burglar bars and window frames. Many buildings bear the weight of colonialism, apartheid and white guilt: a Cape flat laid out so the servant and her employer need never pass each other on one staircase, a sold cottage mourned with people without homes asleep on a neighbour’s stoep, a box of nameless bones in a Cambridge library.

AI-generated summary

About the book

Form

Poetry

Length

78 pages in the original

First published

2025 by Protea Boekhuis

ISBN

9781485316046 (original)